The Write Of Spring

FIRST PERSON

April 4, 1999|JAMES W. HALL

Here it is, spring again, the season to be reborn. Now, let's see. Who do I want to be this year?

I usually give myself about a month to decide. Happens every year at this time. At least it has been happening for the last 10 years. I finish a novel, ship it off, then I have one month to figure out what I want to obsess over for the next 11. One month to choose the men and women I'm going to talk to and hang out with most of my waking hours for most of the waking months till this time next spring.

Way back 30 odd years ago, when I first decided to try to write a novel, I had the impression, after reading Carlos Baker's biography of Ernest Hemingway, that being a writer might be fun. My Hemingway-inspired vision of a typical day went something like this: Wake early, take two aspirin, write till noon. Count the number of words. Five hundred. Good job. Have lunch. Have a couple of beers for lunch. Take a siesta. Wake up mid-afternoon, go down to the harbor, crank up the boat, ice down the beer, go out and fish the Gulf Stream. Come in at sunset. Walk down to the local pub. Buy a daiquiri. Buy another one. Talk to men. Talk to women. Talk to more women. Buy another daiquiri and another one. At midnight stumble home, sleep it off. Get up early, two more aspirin, then read the previous day's work, delete half of it. Start writing again. When the novel is done, take a year off to safari in Africa or cover a righteous war for Look magazine Then after getting good and ready, stuffed to the brim with incredible new material, sit down and start hammering out those 500 words a day again. More daiquiris. More aspirin.

Sounded like bliss. Sounded like paradise.

Unfortunately it's nothing like how it worked out.

My days more closely resemble John D. MacDonald's days. I never met the great man, the creator of Travis McGee, but I was lucky enough to speak with his wife about 10 years ago. She described his days as being almost completely consumed with work. He got up early and went right to his office. He broke for lunch, but their arrangement was that she would not talk to him during that half hour together so as not to distract him from his considerations of plot and character, or alter the mood that he had worked so hard all morning to establish. Then he worked all afternoon. After eating dinner with the family, the agreement was that John D. would spend the nighttime hours interacting with wife and kids, and he valiantly attempted to comply. But inevitably, his widow told me, John D. would begin pacing around the living room, making increasingly larger circles until finally he got close to the door of his study, then without a word, he'd duck away and work till long after everyone was asleep.

John D. MacDonald managed to write two, three, sometimes four novels in one year. It's an astonishing output, especially considering the high quality of his books. Working eight to 10 hours a day, usually six days a week, for most of the year I have been able to eke out only a single book a year. I can't imagine the whirlwind he was riding.

Consequently, a John D. year sometimes had two springtimes, or three, or even four. Multiple seasons when the trees blossomed again, the birds erupted into song and great buds of optimism flowered in the heart.

One spring a year is about all I can stand.

My yearly cycle always begins in the spring, and it looks like this: When the latest book has been carried to term and is finally born, the emptiness of post-partum begins to well in my chest. So I switch off the computer, get up from my chair, go to the door, take an experimental sniff of the air outside, take a slightly deeper, fortifying breath, then I step across the threshhold and set off.

For the next month I pretend to be a journalist. I interview people. I read books and articles about my chosen subject. I research, take notes. I go places I've never been and observe those places carefully. I ask lots of stupid questions. I educate myself. Before the month is over I have become a quick study know-it-all on my chosen subject matter. In the past I've researched South Florida archaeology, international animal smuggling, fish farming, garbage recycling, pain management research. Each time the subject seemed like the most fascinating, exotic and earth-shaking subject ever written about. Spring is about hope. Spring is about great expectations. Spring is a giddy, silly, forgetful time. A time to lie down in the clover and drowse as if the long dreary winter never existed.

Then comes summer. Long and hot and luxuriously fertile. Act One, when the characters walk onto the stage and speak their first lines. Everything is so fresh, so full of sap. I'm still drunk with the elixirs of spring, tipsy with all the new knowledge I've acquired. Gushing forth in great spurts of activity, page after page after page.